Wednesday, October 31, 2007

"IN HIS 1988 BOOK, SEARCHING FOR SAFETY, the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky laid out two alternatives for dealing with risk: anticipation, the static planning that aspires to perfect foresight, and resilience, the dynamic response that relies on having many margins of adjustment: "Anticipation is a mode of control by a central mind; efforts are made to predict and prevent potential dangers before damage is done. Forbidding the sale of certain medical drugs is an anticipatory measure. Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back. An innovative biomedical industry that creates new drugs for new diseases is a resilient device. . . . Anticipation seeks to preserve stability: the less fluctuation, the better. Resilience accommodates variability; one may not do so well in good times but learn to persist in the bad."

Here, then, is the basic difference between the valley and the Hub: Viewing the world as predictable and itself as the center of the universe, Boston has encouraged strategies of anticipation. People try to imagine everything that might go wrong and fix it in advance. But in Silicon Valley, there are no certainties. The future is open and subject to upheaval. Resilience is the strategy of choice. People do the best they can at the moment, deal with problems as they arise, and develop networks to help them out.

The positive side of anticipation is that it encourages imagination and deep thought, the stuff of intellectual life. And it is good at eliminating known risks. It can build confidence, appropriate in a city whose leading business manages the life savings of America's middle class. "Just look at the name: Fidelity," says Hutchinson. "Rock solid, New England." Building Fidelity Investments meant not just hiring good fund managers but getting customers to trust impersonal computers, phones, and customer-service systems as they'd once trusted the neighborhood banker. Anticipation makes such systems reliable."

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

USAFSS Misawa Family - Home Page: "1st RSM and the Misawa Project are seeking those who served in the USAF Security Service from 1949 through 1979. If you fit this profile, you are urged to contact Contact Helen Henderson Helen Henderson for further information."

Monday, October 29, 2007

The saga of Texas chili and Terlingua | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Life/Travel: "When chuck-wagon cooks first began stewing beef with hot peppers in the late 1800s, they probably never dreamed they were helping to create the state dish of Texas. Nor, it is likely, did the chili queens of San Antonio, who were ladling their specialty from cauldrons nightly on the city's downtown streets about then. Neither group could have foreseen that their humble fare one day would be the focus of hundreds of culinary competitions, and two of the biggest would be held annually in a tiny ghost town on the edge of Big Bend. Also Online Prize-winning Texas chili recipes Frank X. Tolbert's chili recipe LBJ's Pedernales River Chili recipe They'd never have imagined that grown men would throw such hissy fits that they'd need two competitions – one of them 'behind the store' – to separate the warring factions. And then there are the three chili societies jockeying for supremacy."

Mac Tip: Display the Date on the Menubar: "Mac OS X only: If you don't want to install a whole other piece of software to see today's date in your menubar, you can add it manually in System Preferences. It's not an obvious checkbox or dropdown, so bear with me."

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter - Dumbledore - Books - New York Times: "But it is possible that Ms. Rowling may be mistaken about her own character. She may have invented Hogwarts and all the wizards within it, she may have created the most influential fantasy books since J. R. R. Tolkien, and she may have woven her spell over thousands of pages and seven novels, but there seems to be no compelling reason within the books for her after-the-fact assertion. Of course it would not be inconsistent for Dumbledore to be gay, but the books’ accounts certainly don’t make it necessary. The question is distracting, which is why it never really emerges in the books themselves. Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should."

MST3K: The Shorts | MetaFilter: "During its run, Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on over 50 short films. Almost all of them are now on YouTube or Google Video. See the list (shamelessly cribbed from here) inside for links."

Friday, October 26, 2007

Geek stars: The secret (nerdy) life of celebrities: "We at Computerworld would be the last to say that science and technology aren't creative pursuits. Still, when most people say, 'Oh, she's very creative,' they're probably not talking about the subject's ability to perform higher math or engineer a network. Such people might be amazed to learn of the remarkable number of actors, directors, musicians and other celebrities who nurture an inner geek."

This design feature caught my eye as soon as I powered the keyboard up, so I brought it into work the next day and took a picture at 40X magnification using the scope in our lab. A small pattern of what must be laser cut holes allows the light from the LED to shine through, but hides it from view when it's turned off. "

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

A Celebration of Tex-Mex, Without Apology - New York Times: "“Cal-Mex is long on burritos and sour cream,” Mr. Walsh said. “In New Mexico, it’s all about green chilies, and in Arizona they are proud to have invented chimichangas — deep-fried burritos. The embodiment of Tex-Mex is a cheese enchilada with gravy.”"

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

"Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," says Minsky. "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. "Scientists shouldn't have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want," he says. "You shouldn't ask them to have the same values as other people."

International Chindogu Society: "The tyranny of the automobile makes life increasingly tough for ecoconscious pedestrians, and finding a safe place to cross can result in inconvenient diversions and wasted time. Now the pedestrian can fight back. When you've found the crossing point that best suits you, simply roll out the the Portable Zebra Crossing in front of you and cross confidently and in safety at your own pace. "

The following ten tenets define the gentle art and philosophy of Chindogu

1. A Chindogu cannot be for real use 2. A Chindogu must exist 3. Inherent in every Chindogu is the spirit of anarchy 4. Chindogu are tools for everyday life 5. Chindogu are not for sale 6. Humor must not be the sole reason for creating a Chindogu 7. Chindogu is not propaganda 8. Chindogu are never taboo 9. Chindogu cannot be patented 10. Chindogu are without prejudice

Monday, October 22, 2007

Boomshine: "Boomshine is an addictive Flash casual game. Click the screen to start a chain reaction and try to explode as many dots as needed to pass a level. The game contains 12 levels ranging from the easy to the hard (only 3.97% of games pass level 12). Over 3 million games have been played by over 100,000 different players."

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Now there's a new product that reattaches plaster without leaving behind difficult-to-disguise bumps. Big Wally's Plaster Magic repair kit uses a two-part adhesive to glue the lath and plaster back together, so a spackle is all it takes to make the repair disappear. Rory Brennan, a Vermont-based plaster restoration expert, developed this homeowner-friendly system after years of using drums of similar adhesives on large-scale plaster-repair projects.

On the Tension Between Object-Oriented and Generic Programming in C : "The author discusses how the use of generic programming in C can lead to conflicts with object-oriented design principles. He demonstrates how a technique known as type erasure can often be used to resolve these conflicts. An in-depth example is presented: any_iterator, a type-safe, heterogeneous C iterator."

Journal of Alias (5735): "A contributed test in t/05_links.t creates softlinks to several directories and then deletes them to test that remove() does NOT follow the softlinks. Unfortunately, one of the places the test links to is File::Spec::rootdir(). As a result, when the test FAILS it will recursively delete the root directory."

Many events of an extraordinary character transpired in Texas during the year 1839. The two which overshadowed all others, from a military point of view, were the campaigns driving the Cherokee Indians from Eastern Texas and the establishment on Texas soil of "The Republic of the Rio Grande." The troubles which led up to the expulsion of the Cherokee Indians from Texas are matters generally known, but little is known to the causal reader of Texas history concerning the events surrounding the revolution against the Centralist of Mexico which led to the establishment of the "Republic of the Rio Grande." This event has historical value to Texas because the revolution had its birth in Texas and, too, because the "Republic of the Rio Grande" unfurled its banner on Texas soil.

The impetuous Texans who joined the Mexican Republicans in this revolution, were venturesome spirits who were not contented with the dull monotony of peaceful scenes. They thought they saw in it opportunities for service and gain. They felt that by taking advantage of these opportunities they could gain both. They were young men of splendid abilities-ambitious and brave but they did not stop to count the cost of failure or consider the reproach they were bringing upon their country."

Mexico - Filibustering: Republic of the Rio Grande: "The red, black and white flag was the national flag of the short- lived Republic of the Rio Grande. A group of rebels known as the Federalists declared a republic based on the Mexican Constitution of 1824. The new state was to include the Mexican States of Coahuila, Nuevo Le�n, and Tamaulipas, with its capital at Laredo. The Republic of the Rio Grande was declared in January 1840. The Centrists in Mexico City (who were responsible for the suspension of the 1824 constitution) moved to quickly to bring the Rio Grande back into the fold. Laredo was captured by Mexican forces less than two months later, but the insurgency continued and the Federalists eventually retook the town. A major Centrist victory at Satillo in October 1840 effectively killed the Republic of the Rio Grande. The Federalists surrendered two weeks later and their new nation ceased to exist. The republic lasted 283 days."

TheHistoryNet | Wild West | The Republic of the Rio Grande: "Texans of the 19th century were audacious gamblers, putting their lives and all they had at risk while settling their frontier and securing their borders. Enemies were everywhere, often outnumbering them. Texans had the Alamo to remember, and a lot more, too. The new Republic of Texas was experiencing plenty of growing pains. Texas had gained its hard-earned independence from Mexico by winning the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, and Sam Houston, the victorious general who was elected president of the Republic of Texas that fall, gained American recognition for the republic in 1837. Still, relations with politically unstable Mexico were hardly rosy. Border conflicts were inevitable, especially when it wasn't certain where that border was."

PBS - THE WEST - The Republic of the Rio Grande: "Mexicans!... It would appear that justice had fled from this world, leaving you to the caprice of your oppressors, who have become each day more furious toward you... My part is taken, the voice of revelation whispers... that the Lord will enable me, with powerful arm, to fight against our enemies. Juan Cortina"

Handbook of Texas Online:: "REPUBLIC OF THE RIO GRANDE. The Republic of the Rio Grande was an effort on the part of Federalist leaders in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, and Coahuila to break away from the centralistic government of Mexico in 1840 and to form a new confederation. Since 1835, with the ascension of Antonio L�pez de Santa Anna,qv then a Centralist, to the presidency of Mexico, Federalist leaders throughout the nation had attempted to force a return to the federalistic Constitution of 1824.qv This feeling was particularly strong in the northern states of Mexico, and, when they failed to achieve success in that enterprise, the northern Federalists worked to win independence from the Mexican Republic."

The Robin Hood of the Rio Grande: "Juan Nepomuceno Cortina has been described by the Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie as 'the most striking, the most powerful, the most insolent, and the most daring as well as the most elusive Mexican bandit, not even excepting Pancho Villa, that ever wet his horses in the muddy water of the Rio Bravo'; in Mexican and Tejano culture he is considered a heroic figure who fought against the injustices and blatant racism of the Anglo-Americans. "

LAREDO history: "During the unsettled years after the Texas revolution, southwest Texas became the scene of hostilities and attacks by lawless elements -- Indians, smugglers, brigands and fortune seekers. In response to the need for authority and order in the area, as well as resentment against the despotic rule of General Santa Ana, leaders from both sides of the Rio Grande met and formed the Republic of the Rio Grande, and named Laredo as its capital. Although the Republic of the Rio Grande lasted only from early 1939 until the late summer of 1840, its capital building still stands. Facing north across San Augustin Plaza, the old capital building, now a museum, is a lasting memorial to the brave men who dreamed and fought for an independence, which was not to be."

"I spotted this flag in Laredo while traveling in south Texas. I was curious about its resemblance to the Texas state flag, so I did some research to determine its origins.

The red, black and white flag was the national flag of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. A group of rebels known as the Federalists declared a republic based on the Mexican Constitution of 1824. The new state was to include the Mexican States of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamulipas, with its capital at Laredo. The Republic of the Rio Grande was declared in January 1840.

The Centrists in Mexico City (who were responsible for the suspension of the 1824 constitution) moved to quickly bring the Rio Grande back into the fold. Laredo was captured by Mexican forces less than two months later, but the insurgency continued and the Federalists eventually retook the town. A major Centrist victory at Satillo in October 1840 effectively killed the Republic of the Rio Grande. The Federalists surrendered two weeks later and their new nation ceased to exist. The republic lasted 283 days.

Although the republic is long gone, its flag is still displayed in prominent places, including the masthead of the local paper."

Oracle's Sample Schemas: Saying Goodbye to Scott: "With the new sample schema, the users have a dependency upon one another. Oracle points out the order of the creation for you in case you want to create these schemas manually. The names - HR, OE, PM, QS, and SH - are in alphabetical order, and that order specifies the order of creation. All installation options (personal, standard and enterprise) receive the first four schemas, and only the enterprise edition with partitioning receives the SH schema. For your convenience, Oracle provides a master script that creates the entire sample schema, and it is found in ORACLE_HOME\demo (the mksample SQL script)."

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Fantasy Planes: "Sometimes I think the most interesting airplanes are the ones that never got built. Some of these were schemes that were too visionary, some are found in fiction, and some were practical aircraft that lost out somewhere between blue sky and finished prototype."

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Apple - Downloads - Create Booklet - PDF Service - Automator Actions: "A booklet is a staple of pages that is folded in the middle to be used like a book. This means the pages have to be resorted before printing and two pages have to be shrunk onto one. Create Booklet does that for you and as it is a PDF Service you can do it directly from the print panel. Additionally you get the Automator Action that is used in that PDF Service."

Scala Home Page: "Scala is a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings, such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation, editing, comparison, analysis, storage, tuning of electronic instruments, and MIDI file generation and tuning conversion. All this is integrated into a single application with a wide variety of mathematical routines and scale creation methods. Scala is ideal for the exploration of tunings and becoming familiar with the concepts involved. In addition, a very large library of scales is freely available for Scala and can be used for analysis or music creation."

We can gather insights from the last 50 years of programming systems to the current time. For the far future, Vernor Vinge’s fine science-fiction novel, A Deepness in the Sky, rings all too true. The young protagonist, Pham, has joined a starship crew and is learning the high-value vocation of “programmer archaeologist,” as the crew’s safety depends on the ability to find needed code, use it, and modify it without breaking something. He is initially appalled at the code he finds:

The programs were crap…Programming went back to the beginning of time…There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it…these programs still worked…down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems…

“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura.

“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret…“You and a thousand friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it… And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then…”

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The Facebook revolution - Los Angeles Times: "It all sounds way too complicated for mortals to understand until you hear Zuckerberg explain it. Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places -- from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We've already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second. "

Soaring on Ridgelift: Facebook – Business as a database?: "Unless you live in Los Angeles you probably won't have seen Fred Vogelstein's article 'The Facebook revolution' in today's Los Angeles Times. Fred is a great journalist and always thinks outside the box – the premise of his article is that another way to look at Facebook is as a huge database of interactions between friends, neighbors and colleagues – a digital version of word of mouth information distribution."

Monday, October 08, 2007

Chill out. - washingtonpost.com: "I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it's caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we're headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it's all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up. We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn't ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits."

Cheat on the Need to Sleep / Wired How To's: "Scientists say that a successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed. 1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in. 2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness. 3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot."

Math Trek: A Prayer for Archimedes, Science News Online, Oct. 6, 2007: "Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed 'a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics.' In The Method, Archimedes was working out a way to compute the areas and volumes of objects with curved surfaces, which was also one of the problems that motivated Newton and Leibniz. Ancient mathematicians had long struggled to 'square the circle' by calculating its exact area. That problem turned out to be impossible using only a straightedge and compass, the only tools the ancient Greeks allowed themselves. Nevertheless, Archimedes worked out ways of computing the areas of many other curved regions."

ENIAC simulation: simulation: "If you are looking for documentation, you might be interested in A Java Simulator for the ENIAC, an 11 pages article about the ENIAC simulation. For further details, you can download the author's diploma thesis Simulating the ENIAC as a Java applet in PDF or in PostScript format. The thesis contains an introduction to the applet from the user's point of view, a brief chapter about the ENIAC's history and software engineering details. As well the slides of a talk about the simulation are available as PDF and as gzipped PostScript (both German language)."

BBC NEWS | Europe | Vatican book on Templars' demise: "The Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages. The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed."

nanoHUB - nanoHUB Home: "A resource for nanoscience and technology, the nanoHUB was created by the NSF-funded NCN and its development is driven by research themes in: * Nanoelectronics * NEMS/Nanofluidics * Nano-Bio Devices"

Friday, October 05, 2007

Toad World > Community > Experts' Blog - Team Coding???: "Toad, it seems that the one universal feature that eludes most users is the Team Coding feature. ... Let’s take a quick look at Team Coding together, and maybe I can convince you it’s worth a 2nd or 3rd look. John POcknell has already dedicated a blog to Team Coding, but I wanted to take a step back and look at it from a slightly different perspective."

Amazon's Dynamo - All Things Distributed: "Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience. To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use."

Thursday, October 04, 2007

ShareBrained Technology � The Chronulator: "The Chronulator starts life as a clock, showing the hours and minutes on two old-school analog panel meters. Dress it up to look like old test equipment, audio VU meters, or motorcycle gauges. Mount it in a picture frame, shadow box, computer case, plush toy, pumpkin… Customize the code and hardware to make the meters indicate something other than time — network traffic/lag, outside temperature, freeway congestion, terror threat level, stress level, whatever! Let your imagination run free."

Historical Anatomies on the Web: Browse Titles: "Images have been selected from the following anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection. Each atlas is linked to a brief Author & Title Description, which offers an historical discussion of the work, its author, the artists, and the illustration technique. The Bibliographic Information link provides a bibliographical description of the atlas, so users will know which edition was scanned and if there are any characteristics special to the Library's copy."

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Journal of Smylers (2592): "If you're using MySQL, or considering using it, here are some things you probably should be aware of. Dealing with Invalid Data MySQL lets you specify restict what can be stored in fields, for example the number of characters in a string. If you try to insert data that doesn't meet the restrictions then MySQL tries really hard to insert someting anyway -- such as by truncating the string"

LiveLeak.com - The Human LCD - Amazing: "South korea: boys cheering for their soccer teams. the most amazing thing is that they do this with their CLOTHES (not holding up cards). they have a jacket that is one color on the back, one on the front, and that they can open or close to show a third color shirt on the inside. One school has also figured out how to use their pants to make shading. "

Monday, October 01, 2007

Engcom: "Virtual Slide Rule See how calculations used to be done before the days of electronic calculators. Find out about an important piece of engineering history. All pieces of the slide rule are draggable."